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Women's long march to equality

WOMEN make up 70 per cent of the world’s poor and two-thirds of the illiterate, according to the latest Human Development Report from the UN. Their main compensation is that they live longer – women now outlast men by a record five years, thanks largely to fewer deaths in childbirth.

The Scandinavian countries, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark, take the top four places in the report’s gender development index, published by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) this week ahead of next month’s UN World Conference on Women in Peking (see Table). But the index, which combines data on disparities in income, life expectancy, adult literacy and school enrolment, reveals no country where women fare better than men.

While women in rich countries are generally further along the road to equality, the study finds that in many of the countries with the highest overall levels of education and health the improvements have not filtered through to women. The report singles out Canada, the Netherlands and Spain here, along with many medium income Latin American and Arab states.

Others, such as Britain, provide near-equality in education and health services, but fail to pay working women properly. British women earn less than 70 per cent that of their male colleagues, below the world average of 75 per cent. The UNDP ranks Britain 39th in the world for disparity in income, below many much poorer countries, such as Turkey, Tanzania, Brazil and Zambia.

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Britain’s growing reputation for inequality is amplified elsewhere in the study. The income gap between the richest and poorest in the country is now the largest in the wealthiest 20 nations.

James Gustave Speth, head of the UNDP, this week described the gender gap as “the most persistent” of the inequalities that have accompanied global economic development in recent decades.

Women, says the report, hold only 10 per cent of parliamentary posts, are allocated less than a tenth of the world’s bank credit and historically make up only 4.4 per cent of Nobel prizewinners, a figure inflated by the inclusion of the 1993 chemistry Nobel prizewinner – the decidedly male Californian, Kary Mullis.

Globally, two-thirds of women’s work is unpaid, compared to a third of men’s work. Women’s share of unpaid work is highest in Italy, at 81 per cent. The report calculates the value of women’s “hidden contribution” to the global economy at &dollar;11 trillion. “If women’s work were accurately reflected in national statistics,” says Mahbub ul Haq, the report’s main author, “it would shatter the myth that men are the main breadwinners of the world”.

In every nation women work longer hours. The disparity is greatest in rural areas, and peaks at an extra three hours a day in rural Kenya, where a large proportion of women’s work consists of fetching and carrying fuelwood and water. Such inequalities are sometimes worsened by environmental decay. In Sudan, the loss of forests has increased the time spent gathering fuelwood fourfold in a decade.

Nonetheless the report points out that, except in parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the work of men and women is becoming more equal. In 79 countries where data were compared, the gender development index has improved over the past quarter of a century.